Online Computer Terms Dictionary - P

piping ==>

pipe

1. <operating system> One of Unix's buffers which can be written to by
one asynchronous process and read by another, with the kernel suspending and
waking up the sender and receiver according to how full the pipe is. In later
versions of Unix, rather than using an anonymous kernel-managed temporary file
to implement a pipe, it can be named and is implemented as a local socket pair.

2. <character> "|" ASCII character 124. Used to represent a pipe between
two processes in a shell command line. E.g.

grep foo log | more

which feeds the output of grep into the input of more without requiring a
named temporary file and without waiting for the
first process to finish.